The Travels of Thelarwen

Cute and Quiet. Makes a lot of hand gestures, a bit like Yoda, but less green.

Topic/Postby Gergel » 13 Sep 2015, 19:42

The Desert.

Sand flies in the hot wind all around me. It enters the cracks of my armor, creaks and crunches. I draw my cloak close around me and walk.

I have been walking for over a week. North-west, the voice in my head instructs, and I head north-west.

The heat is incredible, even for me. In order to feel discomfort from temperature, there must be a temperature difference. I usually do not feel it: my body is almost always at the ambient temperature, and heats or cools as my surroundings do. This heat - left uncontrolled, it would bake me in my armor. I should be losing water. I should be drying into a mummified husk that will forever shamble in this blazing yellow emptiness. Or worse, lie under a dune, dried and immobile.

I cannot allow that. I take a sip of stale water from a canteen. This helps me more than a living person. To a human, the loss of moisture comes in two forms: sweat and breath. I do not sweat. I do not breathe. Much. So the water inside me can only leave my body very slowly through evaporation.

This, of course, adds to the problem of overheating. Sweat is what cools a body. My temperature should be rising to unbearable levels, especially considering the shell of metal that surrounds me. How can even I survive that?

Learn. My companion instructs me but offers no help. What are my options? Douse myself in water occasionally? Unfeasible. Do my best to wait out the daily heat and move during colder nights? Impossible.

Freeze.

I am a death knight. I use frost spells. But these are powerful and short bursts of anti-heat that cannot be maintained for long. Learn, the voice had said. I ponder the nature of the spells. My body overheats and my mind dulls. There is something just behind the veil that surrounds my understanding of my spells.

A thin wisp of cold air escapes my mouth, twirls around my head, inside my armour, across my body. Just a breath of wind. The veil parts. I can see it now. I understand it now. I... survive.

For an entire week I have seen almost no sign of life. No people, no beasts, no birds, no insects. The compulsion grows. I am in pain, far greater than the usual. I barely sustain myself on the odd lizard or a scorpion.

It grows cold at nights. Very cold. I do not mind the chill, its embrace feels like home. I sense moisture deep beneath the dunes. The nightly drop in temperature helps draw it out, as well as to condense the tiniest wisps of water in the air. Sometimes I dig to reach the dampness. Then freeze it, draw it out, gather it around myself. I meticulously gather the icing, which melts into my canteens. It will once again sustain me in the heat of the following day.

I eat a bite of dried meat. I do not hunger, the meat will last for a long time. The times I find a lizard, a snake or a scorpion, I am able to preserve my food supplies even longer.

I lie down on my cloak and stare up into the starry night, until the dawn is upon me and wintry cold once again becomes blazing heat. Then I carry on, ever to north-west.

Sometimes I walk through the night. Mostly I rest.

The second week passes. There is still sand in the joints of my armor, but it has a negligible effect on the hard steel.

The third week begins and proceeds. I see the first signs of higher life. A bird is flying far off in the extreme distance. The fragments of the skeleton of a creature bigger than a human, shining white and polished in the ever-blowing sand wind, lie before my feet.

The birds reach me the next day. Vultures must be rather confused. They sense death. But the corpse is still walking and does not look like it is going to lie down to be eaten any time soon. Still they circle above and around me.

There is another circle of vultures to the west. I change my direction just a little.

On a flat low rock outcropping is a troll. An ancient, wrinkled woman is sitting cross-legged and looking perfectly calm and comfortable, despite the blazing sun, anticipating vultures, and a scrawny canine beast that is prowling around her. She sees, hears or senses my approach, opens her eyes, looks up at me.

I come with the sun behind me, an indistinct shape surrounded by a rippling tatter-edged cloak, shining metal gleaming out from behind the waving fabric. A ghost of the desert, a long-dead corpse, a sand demon.

The troll woman unwraps her headdress which thus far had only exposed her eyes and looks at me without any fear. She eyes me up and down, then waves a hand, beckons to a spot on the stone just opposite of her and makes a sit-down gesture. As I approach, the beast stops stalking the woman and instead turns its attention on me. I do not bother drawing my sword. The canine leaps, I grab it by its throat and break its neck in one motion. The woman cackles and shuffles small bones around in front of her.

My grasp of the Trollish language is vague at best. The woman speaks a dialect. I understand only a few words, but enough to hear the request "sit". I take a seat at the spot that she indicates. She speaks, or rather, chants. I do not believe the words are meant for me. She looks up at the vultures.

What is her goal? To wait for them to eat her? To attempt to eat her? I remember the beast and how gleeful she had been when I had killed it. Not angry because I killed it before it could eat her. Not happy because I had killed it and saved her life. Just satisfied by the beast's death.

Kill.

I look up. The old woman is waiting for the vultures to descend. They are far out of reach of a hand grab. Even a well-aimed stone throw is likely to miss. Not out of range of a death grip spell, however. I raise my hand, yank a bird out of the sky, it drops like a rock and breaks upon our stone platform.

I say a word in trollish. I am unsure what it means, or why I said it. Perhaps it was not I who said the word. "Sacrifice" or "offering".

The old troll cackles again. She rearranges the bones and pebbles in front of her to yet different pattern, looks at the pattern, at me, down again. The woman speaks to me, I only catch a few words but no meaning. She holds out her hands towards my head with the clear intention of removing my helm. I intend to raise my arms to stop her.

No.

My hands drop. She lifts my helm and gets a good look at my face. Her eyes widen and the grin changes, a shade of superiority gives way to a touch of awe. She says a word that even I recognize, despite the dialect and accent. "Ghoul." The word in this context does not mean a particular type of swift rotting Scourge creature as it does in common usage. Instead, a desert devil, a demon.

She speaks quickly. I understand nothing. I lift a hand asking her to slow down. Using my basic grasp of Trollish I say, or hope to say, "I understand little Trollish, I speak less." She cocks an eyebrow and slows down. Speaks to me as if to a child, using simple words and short sentences.

"In your head, <spirit? ghost? evil force? god?>. It orders. You <travel? walk?>. You come to me. You go from me. Go across <big water? lake? ocean?>. Find <unintelligible word>. <Previous unintelligible word> show <truth? reality?>." She notices that I missed something and attempts to clarify. I grasp the word by the apparent meaning. "<Witch? Shaman? Wise-man/woman?>. <He/she> teach."

The woman holds a hand out to me. "Necklace." Does she want payment for her guidance, meager as it is?

Amulet.

I extract the fish-bone amulet from underneath my armour and slip its string off over my head. The woman grabs it, examines it. She nods with clear approval. "You wait. I <change? repair? add?>."

I wait. The trollish witch-woman chants to herself, mumbles spells or curses. Or perhaps she just likes to talk to herself. She extracts fangs from the dead beast, the beak from the vulture, and claws from both. From her bag she acquires what looks like a large vial of thick silithid resin. She molds a piece into a thin roughly circular shape. It should be sticky and difficult to work with, but the woman does not seem hindered in the least. Decades' worth of expertise, I suspect.

The fangs and claws are arranged along the outer edge of the resin disk. The beak goes in the upper-middle. She picks up a little bit of desert sand from our rocky platform and sprinkles it a strange pattern on the lower-middle.

Finally she sets the disk aside, picks up another small piece of resin and molds it into another disk, just like the previous one. She is very, very careful as she sets the second disk on top of the first. The claws, fangs, beak and sand are trapped between them like an insect in amber. Two disks meld into one.

The old troll reaches out, takes my hand, relieves it of its gauntlet. I do not even attempt to protest this time. The witch-woman pulls my fingers towards the resin disk. She points at me, then at the disk and says a word I do not recognize. Then another, I guess a synonym, but I still do not understand. She frowns. The woman conjures a spark on her palm and makes a show of throwing it aside at something, then points at me, makes a spellcasting motion again and finally points at the disk. She wants me to cast a spell. I am not a spellcaster.

The troll scratches her head and very deliberately wraps her arms around herself, shivers heavily and chatters her teeth together, going "brrr, brrr" all the while.

A frost spell. I nod in understanding. She grins with satisfaction at a job well done.

I hold my fingers close to the disk and cast a frost spell. At the same time the witch-woman also mumbles a chant of her own. A breath of cold air and something else meet at the resin disk. The spells swirl and mix and briefly cover the disk entirely in a layer of ice crystals. They disappear almost instantly and the disk... looks different. Solid. The troll picks it up with a satisfied grunt. She digs out a thin drill, makes a small hole through the disk at the top, and threads my amulet's string through it. The string now holds two amulets.

She hands it back to me. As I work on placing it back under my armour as well as replacing my helm and gauntlet, she bounces up from her rocky seat and beckons me.

There is a descending stretch of desert sand behind her. It ends at a line of trees. Behind these is the ocean once again.

"Go. <Spirit? ghost? evil force? god?> guide. Go now."

And she shoos me away, just like that. The troll woman sits down on her spot again and begins chanting, completely ignoring me from this point forward.

I head towards the beach.
What kind of sick individual burns a book full of perfectly good dark arts?!
- Darkscryer Raastok
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Gergel
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